The retail merchandiser, drugstore and supermarket industries have placed an impetus on reducing labor costs. Additionally they have expended energy in a variety of different ways to reduce or eliminate the amount of time required to process items to be purchased by a customer. To this end, there have been a number of self-service checkout systems developed which attempt to substantially eliminate the need for a checkout clerk. Self-service checkout systems/stations permit customers to process and pay for their purchase with little or no retailer personnel assistance.
Commonly-assigned U.S. Pat. No. 4,676,343 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,792,018, hereby incorporated by reference, disclose systems for the self-checkout of articles selected by a customer for purchase in supermarkets and other retail establishments. The former patent involves an arrangement for purchasing articles which bear a “universal product code” (UPC), a unique code for indicating the identity of the article bearing the code. The UPC of each article selected for purchase is scanned or read into the self-checkout station and a signal indicative of the article identity is generated and sent to a central processing unit (CPU) which has stored (in an associated memory) a list of the UPCs of all articles available for purchase which are so encoded. Accordingly, the list may be a lookup table that includes the price and other characteristics for the scanned in articles (e.g., weight).
Scanned articles are placed on a conveyor following UPC scanning and are then led into a security tunnel, which is used to guard against customer fraud using, for example, various “light curtains” to indicate whether the article has been placed in the tunnel (for example). In the course of article conveyance, its weight is physically measured and a signal is generated indicative of the measurement. This signal is then compared to the weight of the article stored in the memory associated with the CPU. If the measured weight is not within a predetermined range of the weight of the article in memory, the article is rejected (e.g., direction of conveyor is reversed).
In the latter patent, a number of further security measures are affected to detect customer fraud or checkout failure. In one such additional measure, article shape is detected, such as by the light curtain at the entry to the security tunnel. The CPU storage includes, along with the article identity code, a cross-correlation of article shape. This compilation is desirably made from the system itself, as by storage of detected article shape in a system set up mode, through use of the light curtain output signals.
There are typically two methods of payment for self-checkout devices. In one method, when a shopper completes the transaction a receipt is printed at the scanning location, which is then brought by the shopper to a checkout clerk who then completes the transaction by processing payment. This results in the retail establishment requiring personnel to be assigned to a payment station, which, depending upon the number of self-checkout station the store contains, may create a backup of people who want to pay for the their purchase, but must wait for others.
In the other method, the shopper tenders payment at the individual lane when a transaction is complete. Accordingly, in order to perform this method, the self-checkout system must include a payment device/mechanism, which accepts, for example, cash and/or credit (debit/ebt, etc.). Although this method removes the need for a store attendant, it requires a larger self-checkout device (e.g., the self-checkout counter and payment mechanism) which takes up more space that a non self-checkout station, and is substantially higher in cost.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide smaller self-checkout stations which may be easily integrated into an existing checkout counter/system area of a retail establishment, especially small retailers who do not have floor space to spare for housing currently available self-checkout systems.